


The Devil’s Beating His Wife

by FrenchTwistResistance



Series: They Didn’t Send Invitations Out for the Fox Wedding [1]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-27 21:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19798525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Mary Wardwell is confused and disconcerted. Lilith doesn’t help matters.





	The Devil’s Beating His Wife

It’s raining.

It rains a lot.

Mary Wardwell’s door jambs stick with the moisture more often than not. It perpetually smells of damp wood. The persistent humidity of her cottage makes it even more claustrophobic, makes her feel unnaturally and uncomfortably confined in her own skin, somehow.

She lights the fire to keep the chill out and creates an even closer, more humid environment. She kicks herself for it but doesn’t stop doing it. The radiator’s not much better, and at least a fire produces organic smells and keeps her hands busy.

It’s raining.

It rains a lot.

Today, she has taught three English classes, one social studies, one theory of knowledge, and the other two periods had been taken up with administrative duties. It’s all so much muscle memory and hand-me-down PowerPoint slides and routine paperwork. She hardly thinks at all anymore, just sleepwalks through expectations. When one can’t remember large chunks of one’s life, one does what one must to keep afloat.

It’s raining. She doesn’t even bother with an umbrella.

Just as she’s pulling into her drive, to shoulder her way through her sticky door and then listlessly cook dinner, stare unseeingly at a book, mechanically mark essays, she looks up.

The sun is peeking behind a cloud, and approximately three rays of sunshine are illuminating puddles and her car hood, iridescent and startling. Bright and dark, sun and shower.

It’s raining, and the sun in shining. The devil’s beating his wife, as they say. She chuckles and shoulders her way through her sticky door.

She surveys the place with the same weariness and wariness she has the past month. It’s legally, objectively her home; the objects within belong to her; it smells familiar. And that’s what always alerts her to the uncanny otherness. One’s home shouldn’t smell like anything. It should only smell a certain way if you’re newly resensitized to it after an extended period away. She doesn’t recall being away, but the aroma is overwhelming every time she walks in. It’s like recognizing your grandmother’s signature lotion on another person fifteen years after she’d died. It’s jarring and familiar and unfamiliar and rather morbid.

It’s raining, and tendrils of errant hair are curling in the wetness as she crosses the threshold.

The cross is wonky again. She’s had to realign it every day this week upon reentering her home. She decides to just leave it this time. That’s how they crucified Peter, after all, and he was always her favorite apostle—always answering too quickly with erroneous information, always asking stupid questions he already knew the answers to, always impulsively promising things he couldn’t deliver on.

She starts a fire. She preheats the oven for the casserole she will soon put together. She takes off her shoes.

It’s all familiar and unfamiliar, standard and completely new.

She collapses into an armchair and stares at the upside-down cross.

Perhaps she should pray about it. What “it” is, she wouldn’t be able to say. But an airing of grievances and a plea for someone to translate her groanings that cannot be uttered could be reparative in some kind of way.

She closes her eyes and begins, but she’s hardly begun, hardly let her mind wander enough to access her feelings, when the oven beeps. Surely she hasn’t been blanking out long enough for the oven to reach 375. But alas, she blanks out longer and more often than she’d like to admit.

She doesn’t stand, though. Does not think about the hamburger she ought to be browning. Instead she unfurls further, warms her toes by the fire and sinks further into her own oblivion. It’s the place she likes most, these days, the place between sleeping and waking where her body feels both heavy and weightless and her mind unravels with serene surreal images. Not a daydream—she couldn’t consciously conjure any of these images—and not a dream, either—she’s not yet asleep. It’s an in-between world she can access only when she’s profoundly relaxed and is focused only on the hard, slow beating of her heart in her ribs. It’s at this very specific point that she has both myriad groanings and zero groanings, all equally unutterable. An uneasy yet totally tranquil paradox.

Stars and strange visions behind her eyelids, and she sinks into the armchair, waiting for a start awake or the fullness of sleep. But this time, but today.

Today it’s raining, and the devil’s beating his wife.

And there’s a voice.

She’s no stranger to auditory hallucinations. She’ll often wake in the middle of the night swearing someone had been beating on her door like the police; or she’s roused from a nap by the distinct sound of a window’s shattering. Each time, she hesitatingly tiptoes to the presumed location with her .32 tightly in her hand. And every time, nothing.

But this is different. It’s not an aggressive, intruding thing. It’s a soft voice. A voice so similar to her own voice, filtered through ocean waves or volcanic lava or dense ferns.

Mary opens her eyes and reaches for the lamp stand. Alas, her .32 resides in the drawer next to her bed, not in the living room.

Mary blinks and blinks again, says shakily,

“Hello?”

It’s raining. But the sun’s shining. The sun’s shining even more now than it had been when she’d arrived home, and pale, yellow light is filtering in through her Venetian blinds.

A cloud passes, and the room darkens, and the voice that is Mary’s but not Mary’s says,

“Hello.”

Mary’s halfway to panic. Her heart is racing, and her breaths come fast. The hand that had tried to find a gun that wasn’t there clenches and unclenches against her thigh.

She’s peering wide-eyed at her living room rug, and suddenly, a figure appears.

It’s Mary herself. But not. It’s a Mary in a tight red dress, hair wild, confidently sliding into frame.

“What on earth—” Mary whispers.

“Not technically on earth,” the other Mary says.

They look at each other. Mary Wardwell is vibrating in her armchair, frightened and intrigued. This isn’t the typical thing she sees in her half-awake visions. She says,

“Is this a dream?”

Other Mary cocks her head, bores into her with her gaze.

“No. You were trying to pray. And I’m the deity that decided to respond.”

“Do all deities—”

Other Mary cuts her off:

“Look, babe. I can’t speak for anyone but myself. But you are such a delicious specimen.”

Mary can’t stand looking into her own eyes, shuts them, says,

“What the actual fuck?”

Mary hears a disembodied laugh, feels a supernatural weight on her thighs, discerns a ghostly breath at her ear:

“I can tell you all the things you want to know. For a price.”

Mary opens her eyes, sees her own face above her, shudders at the very thought of it. But she’s got to know.

“What capital do I have?” Mary says. Other Mary laughs, buries her face in real Mary’s neck, says,

“Much more than you know.”


End file.
